Sunday, 24 April 2016

ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISM IS NOT JUST ANOTHER IDEOLOGY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN ZERZAN

“Are people happy with
domestication, with leading domesticated lives? I think the answer
is, resoundingly, 'no'.” - John Zerzan

This
interview was conducted by Martin Pavelka and took
place in December 2015, during
the Ekofilm
festival in the city of Brno, the Czech Republic. (The interview was transcribed and edited by R. Capes.)

What do you think is the importance
of environmental festivals like Ekofilm, especially when
visitors to such festival are mostly already environmentally
conscious?

Well, I think that's always a problem
because, first of all: What is the most important or valid strain of
environmentalism? Among some of us there's a very strong critique of
environmentalism in general. It's failed utterly. It doesn't begin to
contend with what is driving the crisis, for example. There are tons
of films, fine films, but everybody knows about extinction, everybody
knows how awful it is. What we need is some analysis and critique and
vision, and almost never do you see that. For me, that's the real
stuff. You can turn on the TV and see all of these nature shows and
they'll more or less say how awful the present situation is, how it's
getting worse and everybody knows that. Well, why rehearse that same
old deal? It doesn't go anywhere. You need something that gives some
sense of understanding. How did we get here?

To me the big question is: What would
we have to do to prevent things from getting worse? Things are
getting worse with the same old environmental stuff - it doesn't
work. So that's the open question: What do you have? You know, I'm
tired of all of this nonsense about recycling or buying the right
kind of 'green' crap. That's absurd, that has nothing to do with
what's going on.

I can tell you that in the US it's
very difficult to break through the constraints, the limits, on
what's respectable or permitted. Some things are just absolutely off
limits. They just are. You won't get a hearing? I've been approached
to be on television and so forth and everytime it's cancelled before
it happens, because they take a look at my ideas and say: “No, we
don't want people to think about these things. No, no.” It's
amazing. It's like a Stalin dictatorship or something. And I can
handle these debates; I've studied these things for years and years
and I can acquit myself on the camera or anywhere else, but they
don't want to hear it.

It's the same - and maybe this is too
far off the subject - as the rampage shootings in the US; almost
every day they happen now, and the question that you cannot ask is:
“What is going on, and what does this tell us about society?” No,
no, no. You'd think it was the most obvious question in the world,
but "no, we don't want to go there". It's very similar.
It's a parallel. How bad do things have to get? I actually think that
reality ultimately breaks down the door, it pushes the door open.
They don't want to hear it, but if you have ideas, the accepted
ideas, that are so far at variance with reality, you can't maintain
it. Sooner or later I think - though I could be wrong - that that has
to change, because it becomes surreal. They're saying these things
that have nothing to do with what's happening, that don't explain
anything. At least, I'm hoping that's going to happen. Who knows?

You think the main era when it all
went wrong, when the ecological crises began, was the Neolithic
revolution. Is it not unfair to say that traditional agricultural
societies exploited nature?

Well, in a way, you could say it's a
relative thing. Traditional agriculture is very much a barrier to
industrial, mass agriculture. Understood. But the real turning point
is the qualitative one, domestication itself. So if that is
problematic, which I think it is, then really any form of
agriculture, any form of domestication, is already domestication,
which opens the doors to the horrors of today. You get rid of the top
soil, you raise food that has no taste, and fifty other things that
we know about.

What do you think of the concept of
the commons, which was criticized by Garrett Hardin in his book 'The
Tragedy of the Commons'? The concept is that we can live in small
communities and live sustainably.

I'm not familiar with that or
Garrett's critique of that, sadly enough. But I think there are some
very excellent experiments. We need the practical skills. We need to
try things, restore the land as much as we can. For some of us, one
source - in North America, anyway - is learning what indigenous
people did. What did they eat? What was the so-called 'edible
landscape', which is pre-domestication? But I think all of these
things we can learn from.

I know people that do restoration
work. It's all to the good. But I also think you need a vision and a
direction, otherwise it remains somewhat limited. You have these nice
experiments, but can't we use those to go further? To maybe go in a
sort of anti-domestication way, in that direction? It is a practical
map, you know; it isn't just theory. If you don't have the skills, if
you don't know how things grow and how to recognise these different
plants, and all that stuff, well, then, you're not serious. You have
to get your hands dirty and see how it works.

Do you know of any communities that
have decided to live like hunter-gatherers?

The opportunities to do that now are
extremely limited. I think that ultimately it will be possible, if we
can reverse some of these tendencies, including the unnatural
population, which is so largely a function of (a) domestication and
(b) industrialisation. If that's what causes the really
out-of-balance population, then if you remove those two things, then
the population starts to go down, probably. But the experiments are
somewhat limited because now everything is working against it. It's
just very difficult. I know people who are pursuing these things in
North America - they're trying to see what can be done, without a
whole lot of capital. They don't have a huge amount of money to buy a
huge amount of land, but they're going forward to tackle these
things, in a practical way.

What do you think about eating
animal products?

I'm still trying to improve my
personal approach to that. I don't eat red meat at all, but I'm not
exactly a vegan either, though I have a huge respect for that
perspective. I guess also part of it for me is the historical thing.
As homo species, we started cooking meat almost two million years
ago, and I'm always wondering: “Do vegans think that humans were
completely wrong or evil because they were eating meat?” It's one
thing to attack the slavery of domesticated animals, of course, but I
don't know if that will rule out any kind of hunting, for one thing.
That's what we were doing for millions of years. They don't like to
look at that as an historical question, I think. But I'm not an
expert on this. I'm intrigued by the vegan point of view, I can at
least say that, though I'm not a vegan. I think it's very good to go
in that direction, away from animal products. We don't need that now,
and maybe we won't need it in the future either. But I don't know.

What do you think of so-called
freeganism: the practice of collecting discarded food and re-cycling
it?

I think it's a great idea. It always
bugs the Left quite a lot - you know, 'that's just bourgeois', or
whatever. But, well, why not do that? It gives you the freedom to do
other things. That's the way freegans I know look at it. I could
spend my time working, being a wage slave, or I could go to the
dumpster and get all of this food that they're throwing away, and
then I have time to do other things that are more interesting. It
makes sense to me. In the US, they throw away perfectly good food -
it's outrageous.

Anarcho-primitivists consider
technology to be evil, but at the same time they use technology to
spread their ideas. Are they hypocrites?

The way I look at it is: Where's the
free choice? Sometimes I'm told: "Well, if you were really a
primitivist you'd live in a cave. You wouldn't be doing a radio show
that streams all over the world." That's sort of true, but how
can you make a contribution if everybody's online. If you don't have
email, you're not in communication with people. I don't like it, but
I'm not just going to sit in my room and sulk, or go off to a cave
and ignore everything. I try to point out that contradiction.
Actually, I know people - you know, green anarchist types who I
totally respect - who don't do email. They refuse. But as every day
or week or month goes along I realise that they - and I'm in contact
with them - don't know what's going on. They just don't. I couldn't
do my weekly radio show without all these sources that depend on
technology. We wouldn't even know about the crisis of the
environment. It's a sad situation that we're so removed, that we
can't have the direct contact, but at the moment that's the way it
is. So it seems a little privileged to just say: "I refuse".
It doesn't get you anywhere.

But it's a continuing discussion. In
fact, I have friends that completely refuse to have anything to do
with media - pretty much any media. But we're trying to start a
dialogue, we're trying to have more communication, and if you are too
pure to talk to people, what's the point? That goes under the heading
of 'practical needs of the anarcho-primitivist movement'. We have a
chance to discuss things and spread different perspectives that maybe
people haven't heard of, haven't thought about. How do you do that?

I remember, well, writing letters.
Obviously, now, people don't write letters. When I first started
doing public speaking I wrote to a friend who'd done a lot of
University speaking, and I said: "Can you share with me some
addresses so that I could write to them?" There was this pause
and he said: "Write to them?" And he knew I meant 'write a
letter'. He said: "You're an idiot. You can write them a letter,
but you won't get an answer. They won't have the time to write you a
letter." And I was really depressed - I didn't realise that it
had already gotten to that place. So then I said: "Well, I'm
going to have to surrender my virginity - I'm going to have to get an
email account like everybody else, and that's the way it is."As
soon as we get rid of that, I'll be happy. But here we are. People
don't even have face-to-face communication anymore. It's pathetic,
it's awful.

You're interested in the problem of
domestication. How do you think we can reverse the process and
de-domesticate ourselves?

That's probably one of the most
difficult challenges. what do we mean by re-wilding or
de-domestication? What would that involve? That's pretty much a
staggering thing, but there it is: If you don't want to accept
domestication, then by definition what you want is de-domestication -
a wild and free approach. You know, people: they survived, they ate,
they had variety, they had even better quality of food, when it was
wild. You know, that's something that's hard to imagine. "Wild
wheat? Well, the wheat has got to be farmed." No, it doesn't -
it grows there, and it has higher protein than other domesticated
wheat. These things exist in nature, and when they're suppressed, or
removed, or replaced by domestication - which changes the nature of
plant species (or animal species, for that matter) - that shift or
change produces bad outcomes. But reversing the process of
domestication - that, of course, is the mammoth thing.

Noam Chomsky, for example, attacked us
on this, saying, "This is madness, this is crazy: there are
seven billion people on the planet. What are you talking about?!"
Well, first of all, why are there seven billion people? He doesn't
seem to be interested in what causes that, what drives that unnatural
population. He also makes it seem like we're in favour of just
pulling the plug overnight and then 'no more domestication'. Well, I
don't know anyone who wants that. People would starve because we're
not yet equipped for any kind of process of transition. We're just
not. But it doesn't mean it's just a black and white thing. In fact,
that's one of the stereotypes: that primitivists go along the
hospital corridor and pull the plugs out of people on respirators.
Nobody wants to do that! But does the whole planet have to die,
because of the grid, because of the machine of civilization that's
killing everything?

There are different ways to do things.
Don't rule out these different approaches, which haven't even been
tried. And even though there are huge obstacles - in terms of
capital, in terms of land, the whole thing - it's not out of the
question. I think it's not out of the question at all. For me, what
it comes down to is: Are people happy with domestication, with
leading domesticated lives? I think the answer is, resoundingly,
'no'. But they're not yet aware of it, or we haven't developed it -
the whole thing: “Okay, what have you got? What's the alternative?
That sounds good, but what does it mean? What actual thing are you
getting at to give instead of?'”But I think we're getting to this
place where the whole modernity thing is just insupportable. It's
getting more and more nuts everyday.

As an American, I'm acutely aware of
these shootings. I talk about them almost every week on my radio
show. It's getting worse everyday and it's spreading to other
countries. Of course, it's not just the shootings - it's a lot of
things, a lot of pathological outcomes, from more and more
domestication. It's hard to argue that that isn't so. It is so, but
it still could be kind of a dead end. Because you hear this too: "I
agree with everything you're saying. All these ideas are very valid.
The observations are correct, and so forth. But you might as well
argue against the sun coming up. In other words, you can't do
anything about it, let's face it." That's the attitude that has
to be overcome. It's the will to break out of this. And if you don't
have that, well then nothing is going to change. You just keep taking
more pharmaceutical drugs, and stumbling through the day, and hoping
you won't get shot by some maniac. What kind of life is that? I think
of parents with kids, our grandkids - what kind of life do you want
for them? It's getting worse by the day. It really is.

The main topic of this year's
Ekofilm festival is handling waste. What do you think we can
learn from hunter-gatherer societies about this topic?

They were not at liberty to waste
anything. Their survival depended on their coherence as a band
society, where everybody had a part to play, and they simply didn't
have the inclination to throw away things like we do - of course they
didn't. So you don't find the pollution, the detritus, the leftover
mountains of waste like we're producing everyday. They had a wiser
mode on that level, clearly I think. They had a lot of amazing
solutions, in fact. The orthodox view of anthropology now - and this
another point to make - sounds utopian, sounds like the invention of
anarchists. Most people are not aware of this. It's a pretty rosy
picture, which is helpful. Many times I've been approached by
students, who come up and say, "I was very sceptical about what
you were saying last week. It couldn't have been so nice in
pre-history, relatively speaking. What you were saying must be some
fantasy." Well, later they come back and say, "I'm taking
basic anthropology one and our teacher said exactly what you said
about pre-history."

You maintain a positive outlook
with respect to the future and believe that we must hope, without
illusions, that everything is going to get better. Why do you think
nihilism, pessimism, and despair are fashionable postures in modern
society?

Well I hate to fall back on this
cliché, but I think some of it is just generational. I was a child
of the 60s, and I'm still somewhat infected by that. It was, at least
for a little while, pretty magical. Kids who grew up in the 80s and
90s didn't ever see anything like that. I know there's a lot of
cynicism, nihilism - "We're doomed, we can't do anything".
It's understandable. You look around and everything keeps getting
worse. You can see it with anarchists too.

One thing I was surprised about, which
I began to notice in the mid-to-late 90s, was that there were
anarchists ready to fight who didn't think they were going to win. I
remember, in fact, one kid saying to me: "You don't think we're
going to win, do you?" I didn't say anything, but I thought to
myself: "Well, why would you take these chances if you don't
think so?" I was kind of baffled, because you can go to prison,
you can get your head beat in - it's not a game. Sometimes it can be
a game, of course, but it can also be very serious. Thinking about
it, I thought: "Well, I have a lot of respect, because he
doesn't think it's possible to do, to change, but they fight anyway."

Is anarcho-primitivism an ideology?

It might appear that
anarcho-primitivism is just another "ideology on the market."
But rather than an ideology, it is an analytical tool that can be
used to put things into perspective, to show that we have lived for
millions of years without the need of civilization and domestication.
I think it's an important thing to try - and I don't know how
possible it is - to keep anarcho-primitivism open, not a closed realm
of ideas, an ideology, but to keep asking better questions, perhaps,
to keep it moving.